Ximian Connector 1.0 Available

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Ximian Connector is out! Regardless if you don't like open source and Microsoft playing together this will let me ditch my Win2k box at work! Here is the press release. Of note, MS Exchange 2000 has a nice HTTP interface to it as well, works wonderfully in Galeon." kittenslietome adds a link to the license under which it's released as well: Connector is not Free software, but rather software Ximian hopes will pay for further Free software development.

Comments

It's not just proprietary software

[Florian Weimer]

It's proprietary software with an extremely obnoxious license. Quote:

4. Security: CUSTOMER understands and agrees that the Software contains trade secrets belonging to XIMIAN, and will take all reasonable steps to protect its confidentiality. CUSTOMER acknowledges that the Software is the property of XIMIAN and contains confidential information. CUSTOMER agrees that, other than to its employees, it will not provide a copy of the Software nor divulge any details of it to any person without the prior consent in writing of XIMIAN.

This means that you must not talk about security problems in Connector with your hired security consultant. You can't even share information with other Ximian customers.

No such luck for me

[Anonymous Coward]

I just started a new job. It turns out we're forced to use Outlook and IE (and a bunch of other corporate approved crap) for all email. But we're the QA dept for a cross-platform product! Solution: let's put THREE computers on everybody's desk... the "Corporate Environment" machine runs remote desktop and tons of spyware, apparently corp. IT CAN and DO monitor these for "unauthorised software" (like, say, the latest moz build, Cygwin, and emacs-NT. nio, sir, I've no IDEA how they got on my machine - perhasp the security guard installed them overnight... ;)

Sadly this sort of paranoid "you can't run anything except what we've regression tested and approved, and it takes forever to get teh std build changed, or approval to run anything NON-standard" attitude has been standard at most large coprs I've worked at (BP, Logica, Bain,..) I can see their point... sort of... but here it's almost beyond the pale -- the doc on "other s/w under evaluation" includes things like "security patches to IE 5.01" (yes, folks, IE 5.01 is NO LONGER SUPPORTED BY MS...) And to top it all, this is a SECURITY company. A very, very big one, based in the US, with software on LOTS of corporate desktops.

Dammit, I just realised I'll have to post this anonymously...

Re:No such luck for me

[afidel]

Damn it when will CTO's realize that IT is a SERVICE, and a very costly one. IT is not the damn ruler of the computer!! It is IT's job to keep people productive, not dictate their whim's to every client. I realize that standardization is meant to minimize counterproductive downtime, but it sounds like your companies policy is way over-restrictive. Here we have a set of "approved" applications and a number of approved machines. If you install something that is not approved and I have reasonable doubt that it is causing the problem, and I am unable to fix things in a reasonable amount of time then you get your data backed up and your machine returned to pristine form. If you don't want the distraction of re-imaging then don't install software that fubar's your machine. This way the client (yes users are IT's clients) has controll and flexibility, but it comes with a bit of responsibility.(wow we treat our client's like adults, isn't that a novel idea)

Re:No such luck for me

[civilizedINTENSITY]

Yeah well but...pulling the engine would be analogus to pulling the cpu and changing the rom-bios, yes? Running emacs would be more like putting a music CD "from an unapproved band" into car's sound system. If it makes no changes to the registry it should be ok.

Re:No such luck for me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are in a large company, why are you using a non-standard development environment? Everyone should use the same development environment.

Original anonymous coward here again. Well, the PHBs don't really care what we run on our dev network/boxes. It's just that we have to have a NT4 Windows box with Outlook and IE for mail and intranet. Apparently I was taking a big risk installing emacs, Cygwin and mozilla. So far no come back but... we shall see.

Anyway, as soon as I've finished fixing this horrible stuff that they thought were "programs" and making them, uh, work, I'm downing tools to move the DEV box from W2K to OpenBSD. (My team leader claimed I had to use W2K on the dev machine, too, but it turns out that he only said that cos he doesn't understand anything else... :) )

Ximian Connector

[BobandMax]

Ximian has gotten this backwards. What is needed is a fully functional replacement for Exchange Server, not clients. We need to rid the data center of MS.

Advice on how to advocate it would be good too

[SweenyTod]

Like most people, I assume, I work in a Windows dominated workplace, and while software products like this are great news, I am at a bit of a loss on how to promote them in my company.

Is there a site or a HOWTO that gives hints on how to start getting the upper management in a company thinking about alternatives like this?

What kind of hack is this?

[iceT]

Exchange2k WITH OWA enabled is the requirement? So I bet this isn't REALLY talking to the exchange server.. It must be doing SMTP/IMAP4/LDAP and using a Web-browser for calendar. Why the HELL would I want to pay $70 for that?

Can anyone confirm that? What was $70+Evolution+galeon have that Evolution+Galeon doesn't have? One window? That's a lot of money to pay for one window...

Re:Can't ditch my Win2k box just yet. CAN, h�!!

[udippel]

Can, dear all!! Thanks to a guy by the name of Dmitry Rozmanov [SMTP:dima@xenon.spb.ru] He has created a ridiculous nice utility: http://www.geocities.com/rozmanov/ntlm/ Works really great! Wished, someone else had done the same for X400; so that we could read our addresses from Exchange without $69 plus OWA! Uwe

mechanism?

[psamuels]

Anyone up for some free karma? Explain what mechanism this uses. Is it a meta-front-end for the OWA front-end, or does it actually use MSRPC?

If the latter, what RPC implementation does it use? MSRPC is based on DCE/RPC, for which there is a free implementation on Sourceforge - I'm curious as to whether they're using that or something else.

Re:connector ? i want an GOOD exchange replacement

[np_geek]

Corporate Time (www.steltor.com). Not open source, but a very nice calendaring app. They have clients for Mac, PC and Unix/Linux, a nice web interface and a plug-in for Outlook. This is the calendaring server that HP used for Open Mail and was the guts behind the Netscape calendaring server as well. Good stuff.

Re:Just to make it clear

[praxim]

Bias disclaimer: I don't much care either way about free software or not (though I have a slight bit of opposition to it for reasons too complex to explain here).

I don't see how having a proprietary software portion of a business aids the free software portion. Only one half of that company is going to bring in any serious cash, and I'll let you guess which. What would the point be of sustaining the free half, then?

Re:What works for the web interface?

[Rude Turnip]

I've accessed our company's Exchange web interface from Mozilla, Netscape 6, Galeon and Konqueror under Linux and it works great.

However, I don't know if it's just our Exchange server or if they all do this, but there is no "logout" button on the web interface (doesn't come up under IE, either). I just close the browser window.